For the last 12 years, I’ve been working on a project so close to my heart I made it the subject of doctoral dissertation at Florida State University. Until recently, I haven’t had the time or focus to continue my work on what I’ve found to be a fascinating, challenging and spiritually-inquisitive subject: thousands of years of burying our dead, stories told through science, and how death shapes culture.
Introducing “The People Buried Here”
Every major U.S. city was built atop an ancient one, and the hundreds of millions of people who lived and died here are still buried beneath it all. The People Buried Here is an investigation of the burial places and practices of North America, over space and through time, and their marriage with modern physical and social infrastructure.
The story starts with Native American burial mounds plundered by road-pavers, earth movers and amateur archaeologists in South Louisiana, and advances to the Yellow Fever graveyards moved and resettled during 1960s …
